CIMON went rogue back in 2018. This robot stopped taking orders. But now a second robot CIMON-2 is making its way towards the International Space Station. Unlike the original robot, CIMON-2 will follow the astronaut autonomously or on command.
This second robot uses IBM’s Watson system for its artificial intelligence. It is a step ahead from the previous model of the robot because it has few upgrades. CIMON-2 has the ability to be “an empathetic companion”, thus it can easily evaluate human emotions. Airbus developed this technology on behalf of German space agency DLR.
The robot also has the ability to gauge the emotions. It can do so because it has more sensitive microphones, more robust computers, and IBM Watson Tone Analyzer technology. The tone analyzer uses linguistic analysis to detect emotion from the tone of a conversation. Detecting the tone of a conversation is important because through it the robot can learn whether an astronaut needs assistance.
It was feared that CIMON could be HAL-9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But IBM’s Matthias Biniok rubbished fears. He said that it was a successful mission. CIMON-1 ignored some of the requests from ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst that didn’t mean it posed a threat to humanity.
There were troubles regarding the Robot. One of them was the robot CIMON couldn’t turn on CREW mode. Because of which it heard the conversations of the astronauts and posed a question as well an answered some questions. This was just a training error, and the robot isn’t self learning. So there is no need to worry about it going rogue.
CIMON-2 will be on the floating laboratory for up to three years to help the astronauts. And robot will also help with putting AI into the cloud for future space flights. This will effectively give astronauts unlimited knowledge and data.